For months, Harvard University has been very much in the news, little of it good. Earlier this year, its president, Claudine Gay, resigned after giving disastrous Congressional testimony on antisemitism and being charged with plagiarism. Last June, the Supreme Court held that Harvard’s racial preference policies in student admissions violated the Civil Rights Act. The university is now being investigated as to whether its use of preferences for the children of alumni also violates civil rights laws. Critics abound on both the left and right.
So the timing is propitious for Derek Bok, who served as president of Harvard from 1971 to 1991 and again from 2006 to 2007, to publish Attacking the Elites: What Critics Get Wrong—and Right—About America’s Leading Universities. Bok’s book is wide-ranging, focusing on issues from free speech on campus and the ideological tilt of students and faculty to union organizing of graduate students and calls by students to divest university endowments from certain corporations.
But at its heart, Attacking the Elites focuses on student admissions. For years, Bok presided over a university whose selection process granted preferences to legacies, donors, children of faculty, athletes, and upper-middle-class Black and Hispanic students—to the almost complete exclusion of poor and working-class students. Now, in the wake of the Court’s striking down racial preferences in university admissions, Bok calls for rethinking these policies. The 93-year-old includes a number of delightful surprises and qualified reversals of his previous positions. Having stood atop the pinnacle of America’s educational establishment, the change in direction could auger a better future for students and the nation’s leadership class.
If Gay, a Black woman, was supposed to represent the new Harvard, Bok stands for the old Ivy League of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant men. He is the great-grandson of the founder of a publishing empire that included Ladies’ Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post, the grandson of a Pulitzer Prize winner, and the son of a Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice.
For most of his life, Bok has epitomized the prevailing species of modern American liberalism. Whereas Franklin D. Roosevelt, another patrician, understood the needs of working-class communities but tolerated and perpetuated the terrible mistreatment of Black people in his New Deal programs, Bok has represented a version of liberalism that does the reverse. For decades, he has for years shown an admirable appreciation for the need to take steps to lift Black Americans, but a glaring blind spot to addressing socioeconomic inequalities, even as America’s economic divide has grown.
In the late 1990s, Bok co-authored, with William Bowen, the former president of Princeton University, the seminal defense of racial preferences in college admissions, The Shape of the River. This study receives a fair amount of discussion in Attacking the Elites. The authors studied 45,000 students at 28 elite universities and found that beneficiaries of affirmative action went on to live productive lives, which contributed greatly to the nation. As Bok observes, the research was cited in the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger to sustain racial preferences for another generation.
But as I noted in a review of the book in these pages at the time (See “Style, not Substance,” Washington Monthly, November 1998), while Bowen and Bok were right about the successes of racial affirmative action, they exhibited an unwarranted pessimism about the academic abilities of low-income and working-class students.
The moral power of affirmative action comes from the connection between the horrible mistreatment of Black people in America and the remaining economic disadvantage faced by African Americans as a group to this day. When the connection between class and race is severed in individual cases, however, the argument loses much of its force, which is why Barack Obama said his own daughters did not deserve racial preferences. Yet Bowen and Bok found that 86 percent of Black students at elite colleges were middle or upper class, and this finding was presented not as a bug but as a necessary feature of elite college admissions. The authors asserted: “The problem is not that poor but qualified candidates go undiscovered, but that there are simply too few of these candidates in the first place.”
After the Supreme Court upheld the use of racial preferences in university admissions in the 2003 Grutter case, Bok’s coauthor, William Bowen, recanted his skepticism of low-income students. In a 2005 book (which I also reviewed in these pages), Bowen found that it would, in fact, be possible to substantially raise the number of low-income students at selective colleges and maintain high academic standards.
Now, a quarter century after The Shape of the River, Bok’s new book provides a highly welcome (if sometimes qualified) reversal. He acknowledges blockbuster research from Caroline Hoxby of Stanford and Christopher Avery of Harvard, which found that America produces 35,000 very high-achieving low-income students every year. Bok admits that during his 20-year tenure at Harvard, elite universities gave very little extra consideration to low-income students, but he now writes: “Selective colleges should surely give low-income applicants with strong high school records some extra credit for having displayed the resilience and determination to overcome a series of disadvantages.”
Still, at times, Bok continues to display his old hesitancy. In explaining why so few highly qualified low-income students even apply to selective colleges, he doesn’t blame elite universities. Instead, he speculates that some “may feel that they would not feel welcome or be happy at highly competitive institutions filled with classmates from backgrounds so different than their own.” Oddly, he does not follow this with a call to change the culture of elite institutions to make them more hospitable.
And Bok continues to raise concerns that “income-based admissions” won’t produce much racial diversity, citing research by Stanford University’s Sean Reardon and Georgetown University’s Anthony Carnevale. He’s technically correct, but it’s also a strawman argument. Although Bok’s book suggests that I advocate that approach, I support universities looking at family income in combination with factors such as neighborhood poverty levels and levels of family wealth—circumstances that powerfully predict opportunity in America. Including those additional factors will benefit Black and Hispanic applicants considerably more, on average, than income-based affirmative action because—controlling for income—Black and Hispanic students are much more likely to come from high-poverty neighborhoods and families with low wealth. When those factors are included, Carnevale has found that economic affirmative action produces high levels of racial diversity.
Of course, some working-class Asian and white students will be admitted as well under a system of class-based affirmative action, as they should be. Given the voting patterns of their parents, opening the doors to such students may address a separate problem that Bok properly identifies: Only 1.6 percent of Harvard students identified as conservatives in 2022. This stunning lack of ideological diversity is bad for education, and it also undercuts public support for higher education among conservatives, Bok notes.
I credit Bok for recognizing, even grudgingly, the data suggesting that high-achieving, low-income students are present in significant numbers, and I also applaud the nonagenarian for another stunning reversal. For two decades, it was standard practice at the university Bok led to provide unfair admissions preferences for the children of alumni, donors, and faculty members, as well as preferences for athletes in boutique sports like fencing and squash. As an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions, I helped document in detail how these policies worked and their adverse effects on racial and economic diversity. In Attacking the Elites, Bok now says university leaders should “abandon” these preferences for the wealthy.
What changed Bok’s mind? A moral awakening, perhaps? Ever the pragmatist, Bok supplies a different answer: Universities can no longer get away with it. The efforts to employ these preferences for wealthy applicants “in hopes these practices will not be noticed have not succeeded. The admissions policies of leading universities have been clearly exposed to public view through lawsuits over racial preferences.” The jig is up, he correctly argues, and continuing to employ these preferences will only invite government action.
During the litigation, it should be noted Harvard vigorously defended these practices. Interestingly, in the acknowledgments, Bok thanks Yale University Press for accommodating “my desire to delay publication until after the Supreme Court announced its decision on the legality of admissions preferences for minority applicants.”
Now that the Court has ruled, universities must rethink their policies. As Colorado College President Song Richardson has argued, “Affirmative action made us complacent. Now that tool is gone, and I’m optimistic that all of us can work together to fix our broken system.” Much to my surprise and delight, Attacking the Elites provides powerful insights into how to do so.
